In Memory

Sunday, February 19, 2012

You can lead a horse to water.....

...but you can't make it drink! Well in this case it wasn't a horse but a donkey, and it wasn't a donkey, it was many donkeys! Now that hydro finally has been hooked up to the new donkey house it was time to make use out of the automated water fountains for the donkeys. But with the donkeys being donkeys it wasn't as easy as just letting them figure it out by themselves. Like always something new is observed with great curiosity but also with great caution, so in this case caution won out over trying the next water buckets. The odd one has figured it out that it doesn't hurt them, and it's ok to use, but most of them were extremely curious yet too scared to try it out, so our job today was to try to make them less scared of them. We spent about an hour on the girls side, slashing in the water and showing them that is really is only water and nothing scary even though it makes a gurgling sound when it fills back up. I tried to show them that it's really water that I am getting out of these funny looking buckets that make strange noises. Here is Franco taste testing.

In the meantime the boys on the other side of the fence were carefully watching and see how it's done. Here are Odin, Tengen, Eeyore, Indy and Hershey taking notes. And Tengen actually did try it by himself.

On the girls side, progress was slow but Franco finally took a sip, and Dolly was a show off by showing them how it's done.

We ended up giving them their "normal" water troughs back for the time being, because they really seem to have a hard time getting over their nervousness and they were all obviously very thirsty, because as fast as we filled their troughs it was just as fast empty again. Having both things going it will give them some time to adjust and get used to the noise of the new water buckets.

After all the chores were done, we hung out in the main herd some more and watched the girls much on their new barley straw. Here are Donkeschoen and Orly digging in.

That's what they were probably waiting for....I remember one winter when it was so icy down the path they used to go down to the barn, and I wiped out and slid all the way down and they were standing on top of the path and watched....I got up, brushed myself off and said to them...this is not the way you go down there...and they walked around me. Silly donkeys!